At the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit this week in Austin, TX, SAP LeanIX introduced a number of product innovations aimed at helping companies optimize IT costs, standardize and modernize their enterprise architecture, and adopt and govern AI. Taken together, these innovations offer customers a broad range of essential capabilities for driving transformation today and into the future.
Funding innovation through IT cost optimization
In his keynote session at the Summit, André Christ, co-founder and general manager at SAP LeanIX, pointed out the challenges companies face today when it comes to funding innovation. He showed that innovation today relies less on new investment and more on reallocating existing budget.
Against this backdrop, André introduced a number of features focused on optimizing IT costs by providing greater visibility into the total cost of ownership for specific applications. These features including adding cost KPIs to the architecture executive dashboard, the ability to configure and add calculations in spreadsheets, and adding an application TCO view in the application landscape report.
Thanks to this increased level of visibility and granularity with regard to application costs, IT and other business leaders can make truly data-informed decisions regarding IT budgets. As a result, they can identify areas where resources can be shifted to strategic IT investment and act on what they find.
Enabling innovation through standardization
Innovation requires visibility but it also requires a solid and predictable foundation. Standardization and modernization of your enterprise architecture provides that foundation. André talked about three different areas of in which LeanIX's latest innovations support these efforts.
First, André focused on the ways that SAP's integrated toolchain provides end-to-end support for ERP transformation. ERP transformation, of course, involves both standardization, by moving away from customization and towards a "clean core," and modernization by moving to the cloud.
In his presentation, André highlighted how the integrated toolchain, and especially the integration of LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and Cloud ALM, enables automated SAP landscape discovery. By syncing applications and processes in LeanIX and Signavio and initiative syncing between LeanIX and Cloud ALM, these innovations de-risk transformation while facilitating faster time to insight and execution.
André also highlighted how the integrated toolchain continues to grow, including both other SAP solutions as well as important solutions from our partners such as Tricentis, for automated testing, and Syniti, for data migration and management.
Finally, he showed how the discovery features of the toolchain enable both BTP extension discovery as well as deeper discovery of software components. This latter feature allows for the automated understanding of your product architecture.
From standardization to modernization
Discovery and standardization are not an end in themselves. Visibility and insight into your current landscape should serve as the springboard to your future state. To help you envision and create that future state, André also announced a new visual-first approach to target architecture planning.
In the past, target architecture planning could be a complex and fragmented process, requiring the coordination of future views, current views, interdependent decisions, and business context. Our new planning approach lets you start by diagramming your future state and then modeling backwards. In this way, you can surface and compare different options, decide which route you want to take, then plan and execute.
The target architecture planning journey we are introducing now looks like this: Design -> compare and decide -> plan and take action. It streamlines the process, from design to execution, while allowing you to make thoughtful, data-driven decision every step of the way.
What's more, André announced that Q4 will also see the release of AI-assisted architecture guidance to support both EA management and ongoing EA transformation.
AI adoption and governance
Back at Sapphire, the AI agent hub in LeanIX was announced from the main stage. The idea is fairly simple: Just as LeanIX is your single source of truth for applications, it can and should serve as your single source of truth for AI agents. Bringing this to life begins with agent discovery–uncovering which agents have already been deployed in your landscape.
Discovery allows you to create your agent inventory, which will include third party agents (from Google and Microsoft, for example), Joule agents, and your custom agents. With a robust agent inventory in LeanIX, you can begin analyzing agent deployment, understanding what capabilities they support, what applications they depend on, and where you can get the most impact from agent deployment.
From there you can track and manage agent adoption with the new agent radar and executive dashboards.
But agent adoption itself requires the right technical foundation. To provide that foundation, André also announced the launch of the SAP LeanIX MCP server.
MCP servers securely connect AI clients (on-device or cloud) to enterprise data and tools. They also expose only approved resources (files, databases, records) and provide tools and APIs for AI to interact with systems safely. Finally, they supply reusable prompts and guardrails, ensuring users control what AI sees, generates, and execute.
The future is only beginning
These are very exciting times in EA, and enterprise software more broadly. In Austin at the Summit, André painted a clear picture how ongoing innovation in LeanIX will support customers every step away on their journey into the future.
From funding innovation to modernizing your IT landscape to unlocking the unprecedented power of AI, LeanIX continues to provide companies features and capabilities that make transformation both possible and manageable.
And through integration with Signavio, WalkMe and the entire transformation toolchain, LeanIX continues to make it possible for companies to develop and grow a transformation capability that is both and scaleable and sustainable, today, tomorrow, and beyond.
